Mitterand, A Study in Ambiguity

Resumen del libro

Aesthete, sensualist, bookworm, politician of Machiavellian cunning: Francois Mitterrand was a man of exceptional gifts and exceptional flaws who, during his fourteen years as President, strove to drag his tradition-bound and change-averse country into the modern world. As a statesman and as a human being, he was the incarnation of the mercurial, contrarian France which Britain and America find so perennially frustrating. He embodied the ambiguities and the contradictions of a nation whose modern identity is founded on a stubborn refusal to fit into the Anglo-American scheme of things.

Yet he changed France more profoundly than any of his recent predecessors, arguably including even his great rival, Charles de Gaulle. During the war he was both the leader of a resistance movement and decorated for services to the collaborationist regime in Vichy. After flirting with the far Right, he entered parliament with the backing of conservatives and the Catholic Church before becoming the undisputed leader of the Left.

As President he brought the French Communists into the government the better to destroy them. And all the while he managed to find time for an extraordinarily complicated private life. This is a human as much as a political biography, and a captivating portrait of a life that mirrored Mitterrand's times

Biografía del autor

Philip Short comenzó su carrera como periodista en 1967 en el Drum magazine en Johannesburgo y Harare. Poco después pasó a colaborar con agencias como Associated Press y con periódicos como Time magazine o The Financial Times desde Blantyre, en Malawi. En 1973 ingresó en la BBC como reportero enviado a Moscú (1974-1976), Pekín (1977-1981), París (1981-1990), Tokio (1990-1995) o Washington D. C. (1996-1997). Short ha sido también corresponsal de The London Times y de The Economist, y profesor invitado en numerosas universidades. Entre sus publicaciones cabe destacar Banda (1974), biografía del presidente de Malawi, The Dragon and the Bear (1982), donde compara la Unión Soviética postestalinista con la China postmaoísta, y Pol Pot (2005), una biografía sobre el principal líder de los Jemeres Rojos.